


How to make a monster

by TheFierceBeast



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 17th Century, Backstory, Bullying, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Crowley Backstory, Crowley and Feelings, F/M, Gen, Historical, Human Crowley, M/M, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-05-21 08:03:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6044179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFierceBeast/pseuds/TheFierceBeast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A history of Crowley, from Fergus's childhood to The King of Hell. </p><p>Rating will change and tags will be updated with added chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mama's wee curse

**Author's Note:**

> Erm, I just really love Crowley and I know he's kinda evil and stuff but I think he gets a pretty hard time in both canon and fanfic so I wanted to try and tell his story and hopefully work in all the canon details I can find and try to explain a little how he ended up as he is. I hope I do it justice as it's not the usual type of thing I write.

Under the table is the best spot in the house. The best spot to hide. The only spot to hide, to be fair, when the only furniture is the table and his mother's chair and the looming dresser that stretches the whole back wall. He'd hide in one of the two closets at the bottom of that dresser but he learnt too quickly that they latch from the outside...  
"Fergus?"  
He wrinkles his nose and shuffles silently backwards, pressing against the stone wall. Watching the fire jump in the grate, the twist and dance of it, beauty in the shadows. It's strangely calming, just the pop of burning peat. Then, his mother's voice again. "Don't think I can't see you there."  
Mother's name is Rowena and she's the most beautiful lady in the whole world, even if her fingers bite sharply into his arm when she drags him out of hiding. "Get out there and fetch some kindling."  
He doesn't talk much. It doesn't seem to profit him. But now, looking between mother and the door, Fergus frowns, forming words. "But mama..."  
He flinches at the warning smack to his ear. The wind whistles in through every crack around the window shutters, icy, but he can't tell if it's howling in sympathy or laughing at him. "But me no buts, you wee curse. Now get out of my sight, you look like your pig father."  
The rain hits his face like pins. Fergus holds his coat around him but it's more patch than jacket, mended over and again in the way mother taught him, and he's soaked to the bones in seconds. His hands turn a funny mottled red, closing around sticks too wet for burning anyway. Why would she send him out in this weather? Unless she wanted him out of the house for some reason. Unless she just wants to punish him. Cradling his bundle of dripping sticks, he trudges back to the bothy. Peers through a crack in the door. It's always cold in there but now, looking in from the storm, the orange firelight looks warm as high summer. Fergus shivers, a great shudder that grips him by the scruff and shakes him. Even above the wind he can hear mother's voice.  
"...that a man will take care of you. Bollocks to it. Pie crust promises, they get you on your back and then it's out the back door with you. Well. Not anymore. Now they'll see. They'll pay." She rearranges something on the table. A knife. Herbs. A wooden bowl. Cooking? His belly growls, interested. The firelight flickers off mother's bright hair, tangled to her waist. The wind howls harder.  
When he finally gets up the guts to sneak back in, mother says, "You took your time. What's this? Useless." She throws the wet kindling on to the dirt floor next to the fireplace.  
"It's raining." He regrets it the second he says it, flinching in anticipation.  
"Don't back-chat me, you wee turd." Her kick is well-aimed. "Go and stand in the corner, you're dripping all over my hearth."  
"Mama... I'm hungry."  
"You're always hungry. All you do is eat. That's why you're so damned chunky, little piggy."  
He daren't duck away from the hand that pinches his skinny cheek. Fergus hangs his head. His drenched coat sticks in clammy folds to his arms. Why is he always the bottom of the pile? He kicked the cat once and whilst that had felt satisfying, all it ultimately resulted in was a line of welling red scratches across the back of one hand, and mother telling him he'd got what he deserved. Perhaps he had. When he kicked the dog, Duke, it whimpered but still crept to him that night to sleep curled next to him on his straw mattress. It makes Fergus hate Duke, and love him at the same time. He'd rather be like the cat - lashing out in vengeance - even as he knows he's the one who crawls back, blinded by loyalty and desperation, after every beating. Peering up through his fringe of red curls, Fergus risks a shuffle towards the hearth. Mother is busy again with whatever's in the bowl, muttering strange words. Steam rises off his damp clothes in slow twists like smoke. Fergus feels the comforting, purifying heat of the flames batter his face and just for a moment he wishes he could burn.


	2. Run away, join the circus

When mother moves on, he tags along. Literally. It's hard to keep up with her determined stride and Fergus trips over his own feet as he trails after the path she carves through the heather towards Wick. Eventually, she grudgingly acknowledges him. "You're a stubborn one I'll grant you that. Thought I'd shook you off a mile back." Fergus shakes his head. "Well if you won't get lost then you may as well be useful. Here." The bundle she dumps into his outstretched arms is almost as big as Fergus but it still makes him smile as he staggers; if he's her pack horse he'll not get abandoned. He has a _role_. Mother whistles and Duke trots a circle around her. The cat is lord knows where - back at the bothy, half feral anyway, mostly wildcat. They left in the small hours. Something muttered about angry mobs, flaming torches and pitchforks. Ducking. Perhaps that was exaggeration, but mother has certainly been getting more than the usual filthy looks in the village of late. Wick, she said. Then who knows? Inverness, Edinburgh, Paris - the possibilities are limitless.  
Fergus has never been beyond the parish boundary of Canisbay before. The hills roll out before them, steaming with mist. Infinite.

The only other people they meet on the hill path appear what feels like miles and hours from home, lurching out of the mist like many-wheeled, many-legged, lumpy creatures of nightmare. Up close, it's a little procession with a caravan, two wagons, animals. Fergus makes out the bright colours and swirling patterns painted on the wooden sides of the carts and his heart squeezes with some unfamiliar emotion.  
They're travelling players, far off any profitable path. The man at the head of their procession leans down from his perch to peer at mother, then jumps down to the dewy ground. Mother pushes back her hood and smiles, acid-sweet.  
"Good morrow, mistress. We thought we took a wrong turn, but perhaps not if we're meeting fellow travellers."  
"Where are you bound, sir?"  
The man laughs. He has impressively curling iron-grey moustaches, and an equally impressive but noticeably mismatched black wig. "Where is there to go?"  
Mother laughs too. It sounds bright and false to Fergus's ears. "I'll tell you, but first let me make you an offer you'd be fool to refuse."  
"Oh aye?" The man's voice goes silky in a way that Fergus determines to memorise.  
"Aye." Mother is eyeing the piglets jostling in the back of one of the little carts. "This boy here, see...” She grips Fergus by the shoulder and pushes him and his pack forward. “He'd be a credit to your fine establishment. And you'd not miss three scrawny piglets, surely..."  
The man’s laugh booms, echoing across the empty hillside. The curtain behind him parts and a girl not much older than Fergus sticks her head out of the caravan and echoes his laugh, although she can’t know what the joke is. The man says, "Three pigs? He's not worth one."  
The appeal is audible in mother's voice. "He can cook, clean, sew. You could use him in your show - child, do something entertaining." She nudges Fergus with the side of her foot and he jumps, fumbling his cargo to the ground and scrambling around for something, anything.  
The man, looking down at Fergus, raises a sceptical eyebrow. "If he's so wonderful why are you trying to get shot of him?"  
Mother cranks up the pathos. "I'm just a poor single maid trying to make her way in the world, after my husband passed, God rest him, and all I want’s the best for my boy, my treasure..."  
"Husband, _ha_." The man’s booming laugh is back in full force.   
Mother rolls her eyes. "Look, who'll employ me with a brat hanging off my petticoats? Just take him? No charge."  
Fergus's hands close around only loose stones. He freezes. Glances up between mother's face and the big fierce pirate face of the theatre man and the shrewd black eyes of the girl in the caravan.  
"He's very small." _Oh, he sounds like he's considering it._ Fergus's belly lurches. He can't tell if it's fear or hope. Mother, though, nods eagerly, her smile too wide.  
"Aye! He doesn't eat much. He'll fetch and carry."  
Fergus stands up. With concentrated determination, he starts to juggle his handful of stones. Four in the air. He grits his teeth and crosses the stones back and forth and back again. He's doing well. He's actually doing well. Everyone's eyes are on him. Silent. Cautiously he raises his right foot so he's standing on one leg. Four stones in the air, his hands passing, rhythmic... Mother sighs and nudges him again with her foot and he fumbles, the stones dropping to the mossy ground.  
"On your way, witch," the theatre man says.  
Mother bares her teeth. "Thurso's that way." She jerks her thumb, indicating. The sarcasm is practically palpable. " _Sir_."  
Another laugh from the theatre man. This time it sounds unkind. He hauls himself back up onto the coach seat of the caravan and, reaching into his red velvet coat, he flips a farthing at mother that she ducks to catch and then scrambles in the grass for. The squeak of wheels sounds into the murky distance as the players rumble their slow way off towards Thurso.  
Fergus's voice is tiny. "Mama... Did I do good?"  
She doesn't answer, just clips him round the ear.


	3. In the pauper palace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "So locking me away in a squalid workhouse was your solution? ... You said you’d be back in a flash. Then you disappeared. I was eight years old. EIGHT!"

He slept, he thinks. Certainly he drifted, the cold of the stone doorstep leaking into his bones until he’s so numb with it he feels like he’s floating. It’s sort of an almost pleasant feeling, until the rising sun stains the sky pink as blood in the water of mama’s divining bowl and heats pins and needles into Fergus’s limbs. He daren’t stretch. He daren’t move. He just has to wait. Craning his neck, his mouth drops open in wonder as daylight reveals the town around him in all its grandeur. A street with cobbles. Houses, towering, two storeys tall, with tiled rooves and glass in the windows. He’s never seen a tiled roof before: all the drystone cottages of Canisbay had turf thatch tied down with ropes of heather. Imagine living here; it’d be like living in a palace, like a king. Maybe that’s the thought that finally prompts him to move, or perhaps it’s mother’s words echoing, “Wait here for me. I'll be back in a flash. If I'm no back by morning, then knock on the door and say mother said you were to wait for her inside.” Eventually, he can’t ignore morning any longer, even though the people now walking the streets are quite happily ignoring him. He staggers as he stands, his legs prickling and bloodless, useless and rubbery until he’s stamped some life back in him. When he goes on tiptoe to heft the big iron knocker, the old woman who answers eyes him with weary disinterest.

“Mother said I was to wait for her inside.” He hates how timid his voice sounds, now, when he’s here in the big town like a proper man.

The woman leans out over him and looks up and down the street. “How old are you, boy?”

“Eight years, mistress.”

“What’s your name?” Her voice sounds scratchy. Her nose is red as a strawberry.

“Fergus Roderick MacLeod, mistress.”

The woman sighs. Stepping back from the doorway, she wags her head. “Inside.”

 

He realises too late. “Mama won’t…” He begins, but the woman shushes him impatiently as she tugs off his threadbare jacket. His clothes are taken and his hair clipped and he's rinsed down and given a set of new, scratchy clothes.

“You sleep here.” The woman leads him through what seems like a maze of corridors, rooms leading off. She nods to the last bed in a row of beds in the biggest room he’s ever seen and then he’s whisked away again, down a narrow set of stairs to a slightly smaller chamber, filled with desks, and boys. The cold prickle of every shrewd pair of eyes turning to pin him makes Fergus shrink. “Sit.” He obeys, the hard edge of the stool digging into the backs of his thighs. Mercifully, the others look away, as if he’s a novelty that can only hold their interest for mere moments. A mountain of a man in a black gown resumes his ranting at the front of the class. _School_ , Fergus thinks, distractedly. He picks at the jacket and trousers he’s been dressed in. They’re too big, and itchy, but at least far warmer and less threadbare than his own clothes had been-

“ _BOY_.” The accusatory roar pulls his gaze, sharp and guilty. And, yes, it’s him the man is glowering at: Fergus bites his lip. The man gestures with the birch switch in his hand to writing on a board. “What was it I was saying?”

 _I don’t know_. The teeth gnawing at Fergus’s lip taste blood. Hoping, he reads from the board. “He becometh poor that dealeth a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. Sir?”

The man’s eyes narrow. Beside him, Fergus hears a stifled snigger, but he doesn’t dare turn his head to see. “You recall this from church, boy?”

“No, sir. I read it from the board, sir.”

The unkind laughter grows more insistent, quelled suddenly by the ice-water of the master’s gaze. His voice is precise. “You can read?”

“Yes, sir. Mama taught me. She learned from my father.”

“You have a father?” This time the master does not seem to object to the ripple of mirth that runs through the room. “Get up here, boy. Hold out your hands.” _Religious lessons. Church. He’s never attended: mother was not what you’d call pious, and Fergus has never found much time for a deity who promises mercy to the poor and then leaves them shivering._ The sting of the birch across his palms holds not a fraction of the horror of all those faces gawking at him in amusement; if anything the throb and heat of it is a welcome thing, familiar and grounding. His cheeks flame as he walks back to his allotted desk. “That is for insolence.” The master says.

*

It takes less than a week for it to feel like he’s been there for years. He only cries himself silently to sleep for the first night, before learning the swift lesson that sleeping four to a bed means that kind of weakness does not go unremarked upon, or indeed, un-imitated ad infinitum. “Greetin’ Gussie,” whines Tommy Munro, screwing his fists into his eyes like he was born for the stage, “Cries like a lassie.” Munro hates him on sight. This is, Fergus suspects, because Munro hates everybody on sight, but it’s hard not to feel it personally. Munro’s the eldest and biggest of the boys in the dormitory – he’s nearly thirteen already - which is a blessing because it means he’ll be moved out into a shared room soon, but a curse because for now, he rules uncontested. His pretend crying fit gets louder, more expansive, the tarry knot of rope he’s picking apart slipping from his lap in the enthusiasm of his performance. Fergus’s fingers dig into his own piece of rope, feeling the strands splinter into his skin; comforting pain. A watery uncertain smile wavers on his lips, _halfway between laughter and tears; make your choice_. He remembers the theatre man in the caravan who threw a coin to mother, remembers his big fierce face and the way his voice had boomed and then purred. His eyes harden, and his smile firms. The laugh he forces sounds almost convincing.

*

It turns out that it’s not even too difficult to sacrifice pride in order to survive. In his head, Fergus turns it into a game: they don’t know what he’s truly thinking of them, what he’s plotting, and that means he’s winning. Fergus does a lot of living inside his head.

“How you liking the pauper palace?” Duncan isn’t his friend, but he’s small and timid too and only the fact that he’s been there for longer puts him higher on the chain than Fergus: a precarious position that Fergus fully intends to oust him from at first opportunity. For now, he bides his time.

“I’m liking the cheese.” He says, honestly. He’s still skinny, even after countless months of two meals a day in the crowded refectory, but at least it’s more bread, cheese and gruel than he’s eaten in his life before.

Duncan smirks. “You’re no liking the baths.” He extends one little finger and wiggles it and Fergus narrows his eyes, willing death upon him. When Munro does this, Fergus laughs, for self-preservation’s sake. _Wee greetin’ Gussie, his yard’s more like an inch._ As soon as Munro clocked him at weekly bath-time the taunt had spread like sickness, even the boys outside his dormitory flashing him that dreaded silent gesture. _Fergus: inadequate, unmanly._ When Duncan does it, Fergus doesn’t bother pretending to laugh along, even if he’s not quite far enough up the ranks yet to risk reaching out and _snapping_ that finger back. Oh, but the thought of it – his mouth waters, strangely, the fantasy enticing. “What’s the matter, Gus? You gonna bawl?”

“No.” He says it decisively and Duncan almost flinches. A smile flickers on Fergus’s lips. “I’m gonna get out of here.”

“And how you doin’ that?” Duncan’s eyes hold a mixture of amusement and uncertainty. “You’re nowhere near sixteen.”

“I’m nearly ten.” He knows too much now, too much about the reality of institutional life: only families can leave when they choose. At fourteen you go on to local work. Unless of course you’re an abandoned child, then they can detain you by law until you’re sixteen, working unpaid, more like a prison than a poorhouse, because vagrants are the lowest of the low, so much worse and more undeserving than the honest poor… “And I’ll leave soon enough when mother comes for me.” The snort of laughter that prompts from Duncan is loud and rude, enough that Fergus feels genuinely offended. “She’ll come!”

“Aye, like she’s come every Sunday for her visit this past year?”

“She’ll _come_.”

“Why would she?” Duncan is really laughing now, with the malice nurtured in every bully who prays _anyone but me_. “You’re but a dickless wee crybaby and she’s nought but a whore witch who ditched you and ran away.”

The roar that tears from him when he launches himself at his laughing enemy even surprises Fergus. He’s only barely aware of the faces that turn to them, all round shocked eyes before the jeers surface, cheering them on with no thought to loyalties, only violence. Duncan’s face is a pale smudge against the dusty workroom boards. Shreds of oakum in his hair. It’s only moments until someone will come running, until Fergus will surely pay for this unprecedented outburst with the whipping of his life. But nobody comes – or, at least, the seconds stretch out like the long moments he’s heard come before death, the din of voices merging with the blood pounding in his head to a sluggish roar like dreams he’s had of drowning, of burning, the rush of water and flames the same deafening hush of silence in the end. _Whore. Witch._ Why is that what tipped him, finally? She left him. He hates her. But she’s still _his_ to hate. Better then, to defend his own honour. The skinny chest he’s sitting on gives an alarming dull crack and Fergus bounces, once, to hear the squeak of the boy trapped beneath him, what little colour left in Duncan’s cheeks draining to a sickly grey. “Dickless, am I?” _Say it like the caravan man, say it like him_. Fergus pulls his lips into a cruel, purposeful smirk. With a little scuffling effort, he takes Duncan’s hand, threads their fingers together, bringing it up before his opponent’s face. He feels strangely still inside, calm and detached from the baying group of boys shouting, _scrap, scrap, scrap_. Almost tenderly he separates Duncan’s little finger from the rest of his squirming digits, holding it with difficulty in place. His fist closes around it. Duncan’s mouth stretches in a silent scream of dismay. “Well, you’ll no be needin’ this then,” Fergus says, and _tugs_.


End file.
